On 7 March 2010, we published an article by Zoe Margolis. In part of the first edition of the newspaper and online, this article carried the headline, “I was a hooker who became an agony aunt”. This was written by the newspaper not Ms Margolis. We accept that Ms Margolis is not and never has been “a hooker” or otherwise involved in the sex industry. The wording of the headline was a mistake and seriously defamatory of Ms Margolis. We offer our sincere apologies to Ms Margolis for the damage to her reputation and the distress and embarrassment which she has suffered.

* Zoe Margolis: I'm a good-time girl who became an agony aunt

Sonos has now confirmed the Index Ventures investment we reported two days ago. The company has taken an additional $25 million in capital from Index, raising the total raised by the company to $65 million. And Index Ventures Partner Mike Volpi, a former CIsco executive, has joined their board of directors.

The funds will be used for growth equity, says the company, which signals that they are past the proof of product stage (well past, in this case) and will use the funds to speed market penetration.

From our original post:

Volpi will bring real expertise to the Sonos board. As recently as 2007 he ran an $11 billion routing and access products busines for Cisco. He clearly knows how to sell products at scale.

Sonos has been around since 2003 and has raised some $40 million from private angel investors and BV Capital. Until last year the company sold very high end music products that users loved passionately, but the mutli-thousand dollar price point for a complete system made mainstream penetration difficult.

But in 2009 Sonos began selling a new product, the S5 music system, that users control via their iPhone. The S5 is just $400 and has driven “massive growth” says the company.

Like Flip last year, Sonos likely had a choice between selling now or raising new money for major expansion. Flip sold to Cisco. Sonos, it seems, is taking more money, but adding an ex-Cisco exec as well. Perhaps they’ll get their cake and eat it, too.

The rise and fall of Desirée Rogers, the White House social secretary, is in some ways a familiar Washington tale.

The online political writer talks about why he’s running against Barbara Boxer.

Print publishers are hopeful the iPad will hit the streets next month.

There are already several test examples out there. Some blend print and online as BERG's version for the innovative Swedish publishing house Bonnier shows, others ues a more online approach as the video of De Telegraaf shows.

Publishers are hoping the iPad will encourage people to read digitally with users willing to pay for content. It is also hoped that the iPad will be used more in people's leisure time so it will attract different advertisers.

A question which isn't answered is if publishers are ready to serve another platform, in a time when workforces are not getting any bigger, who is to shoulder the extra work?

Maybe the version of De Telegraaf therefore isn't the most thrilling, but the most realistic. As Robert Andrews of paidContent UK points out rightly about De Telegraaf's approach: "It only renders Telegraaf.nl's existing website on the gadget."

Have a look at the different iPad versions, and decide which one is your favorite.

1 Wired and Adobe decided to go for a deconstructed magazine version. They favored on scrolling down instead of flipping sideways, but magazine sides are still the entry point. In addition, they show some new possibilities for advertisers.

2 The Swedish publisher Bonnier R&D asked BERG to help with the transition of the print reading experience to a digital format. BERG focused on maintaining the relaxed and curated features of printed magazines, and compared to Wired it feels more like an app, indeed. In addition they invent a couple of new ways of navigation through "heating up" to select all, cut, copy and paste, among others.

3 The official iPad commercial of Apple shortly shows a really short glimpse of the New York Times application at second 0.6. Developed in house, it has also favorites a more curated feel than the website.

4 Sports Illustrated version for the iPad was one of the first and is a collaboration between Wonderfactory and Time.

5 The Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf transferred its website to the iPad, however this might be the most realistic approach for most publishers in terms of work flow.

Which interactive iPad design is most convincing?

Earlier this week, BoomTown had lunch with Michelangelo “Mike” Volpi, the high-profile tech exec who turned into a venture capitalist recently at Index Ventures.

We also did a video interview (see below) about his new life as an investor, based in London, although Volpi did manage to leave out the big news.

That would be a just-inked $25 million investment by Index from its growth equity arm in wireless home music system maker Sonos, as well as a new board seat there for Volpi. (Sonos’ hot new S5 unit is pictured here.)

In an interview this morning, Sonos CEO John MacFarlane said the money would be used for expansion at Sonos, which is just about to introduce its products into China and Japan.

“This investment is going to help us grow,” said MacFarlane. “We have wind at our back and this will help us a lot in keeping up that momentum.”

MacFarlane said the focus for Sonos, which has garnered $65 million in investments–from BV Capital and mostly angel investors–with the Index investment included, is growth. He declined to give Sonos’ valuation in the new round.

The private company has been profitable, MacFarlane said, but its goal is to break even, as it takes advantage of interest in its devices globally. Only about 35 percent of its business is now in the United States.

While running a small independent consumer electronics company is a dicey proposition, MacFarlane said Sonos is not interested in selling, as Pure Digital–maker of the Flip digital camera–did to Cisco (CSCO) a year ago for $590 million in stock.

In fact, the Santa Barbara, Calif.-based Sonos, which is well known for its innovative top-line (and high-priced) music players, recently moved its business more mainstream with the introduction of the S5 unit in November.

It allows control of the system via an Apple (AAPL) iPhone and only costs $399.

The basic idea? A smart speaker paired with a smartphone.

The S5 has been a big seller and has increased registrations of its products–when the software is activated by a user–by five times previous numbers so far, according to the company.

That could get a further boost with the April launch of the iPad, which seems perfect for controller software apps.

“The popularity of the iPhone is great for us,” said MacFarlane. “And we’ll do something great with the iPad.”

It’ll be nice to have a big score for Volpi, the former Cisco wunderkind. In fact, he invested in one of MacFarlane’s previous start-ups, Software.com, in 1995 when he was in charge of a variety of businesses there.

But the affable Volpi hit a bad patch more recently while CEO of a much hyped but ultimately failed video service called Joost. It was that job that than landed him in even hotter water.

In the wake of the decline of Joost, which he left to join Index, he was personally, as was Index, sued by its litigious co-founders over Index’s planned investment in Skype, the online telephony service which they also co-founded.

Confused? Well, it was confusing.

And not the best start in the investment business for Volpi, after Index pulled out of the high-profile deal in a settlement of the lawsuits.

But, that’s “ancient history,” as Volpi said in the video interview below, which focuses on what’s next.

(News of the Index involvement in Sonos was first reported by TechCrunch earlier this week, though it did not have any details of the amount of the funding.)

Although did not mention the $25 million funding in Sonos specifically in the video, Volpi does discuss his bullishness for consumer electronics.

Volpi presumably hopes others share his enthusiasm.

Here’s the video of my interview with him:

We've just rolled out an initial version of our extensions gallery: simply look for "Extensions" in the navigation panel of Google Wave. The gallery is intended to make it easier for users to discover the fun and useful extensions you all are building with the Google Wave APIs.


The gallery is simply a set of waves containing extension installers (the puzzle pieces). The first wave, "Read me first" contains an introduction to extensions and how to use them. In many cases, those particular waves won't maintain their read/unread status in Google Wave preview; we're working on this. Beyond that, we have some design improvements in the works, but we wanted to get this out there to get feedback and help users find your extensions.

As a tip, you can also use the waves in the gallery to share a direct link to your extension's installer with other Google Wave users -- simply open the installer and copy-and-paste the URL (note: the panel arrangement and search query are included in the URL, but can easily be edited out).

While you're building your extensions, if you'd like them to be included in the gallery, please be sure to submit them for review. You may also want to check out Mashable's Google Wave API Challenge.

We look forward to seeing what you come up with -- especially with the new Google Wave robots API (v2).

Posted by Dan Peterson, Product Manager, Google Wave

There are no shortage of location-based services launching this week at SXSW in Austin, Texas. Many of them allow you to “check-in” places to let others know you are there. So how do you differentiate between then and decide which to use? Well, here’s one good way.

CauseWorld, is a free iPhone and Android app that lets you check-in places, but it has an added real-world bonus: big brands give money to charity when you do so. And this week at SXSW, CauseWorld is teaming up with TechCrunch to offer double point (which they aptly call “karma”) when you check in to one of over 50 venues around Austin (I’ll paste the full list at the bottom of the post), including the Austin Convention Center (where SXSW is held).

We’ve covered CauseWorld, which is the first offering from the soon-to-launch ShopKick, a few times now. It’s a great product because it takes an area that is red hot right now, location-based check-ins, and converts it into good deeds in the real world. For example, if you check-in at a store, you may earn 20 karma points. As you continue to accumulate these, you can turn them into real dollar donations for causes such as water in Sudan or trees in the Amazon. Brands such as Kraft Foods and Citi are currently giving the donations based on what users choose to trade their karma points for. The best part is, you don’t even have to buy anything — you simply check-in at various venues and earn the points. And again, this week at SXSW, checking-in with the app at a bunch of venues will earn you double karma points.

And like any good service with a gaming element, there’s a leaderboard to show who has donated the most karma points. And yes, checking-in can earn you badges, such as the TechCrunch one show in this post.

So if you’re going to be in Austin for SXSW this week. Or really, if you just want to do some good with your mobile device, check out CauseWorld. Find it in the App Store here, or in the Android Market (on your Android device).

Below find the 54 participating double karma Austin check-in spots:

1. Aces Lounge
2. Alamo Drafthouse
3. Amsterdam Café
4. Austin Convention Center
5. Austin Music Hall
6. B D Riley’s Irish Pub
7. Barbarella
8. Beso Cantina
9. Bob Bullock Theater
10. Buffalo Billiard
11. Café Mozart
12. Carver Museum and Cultural Center
13. Cedar Door
14. Chupacabra Cantina
15. Chuy’s
16. Clay Pit
17. Club Deville
18. Cuba Libre
19. Dirty Dog Bar
20. Elysium
21. Emo’s
22. Emo’s Annex
23. Flamingo Cantina
24. Hyde Park Bar & Grill
25. Iron Cactus
26. Karma Lounge
27. Kenichi
28. Kerbey Lane
29. La Zona Rosa
30. Lambert’s Downtown
31. Lustre Pearl, Lustre Pearl Bar
32. Malaga, Malaga Tapas & Bar
33. Malverde
34. Mellow Johnny’s
35. Molotov Lounge
36. Moonshine Bar and Grill
37. Opal Divines
38. Palm Door
39. Red 7
40. Red Eye Fly
41. Rudy’s Country Store and BBQ
42. Rusty Spurs
43. Salt Lick BBQ
44. Spider House Café
45. Stubb’s BBQ
46. Stubbs
47. The Belmont
48. The Best Wurst I
49. The Highball
50. The Scoot Inn
51. Uncorked Tasting Room
52. Velveeta Room
53. Victory Grill
54. Vortex Repertory

Apple’s recent purge of sex-tinged iPhone apps, combined with its lesser-known ban of “cookie-cutter” apps, signifies the company’s new focus on quality, rather than quantity, in its App Store.

Last month, Apple removed about 5,000 apps with “overtly sexual content” from its App Store. And this week Apple told Mobile Roadie, a company that provides templates for clients to build iPhone apps, that the App Store would no longer accept “cookie-cutter” apps — apps made with app-generating services that do little more than reproduce websites or pull RSS feeds from the internet.

“This is a hot issue as more focus is being placed on app platforms to ensure they’re providing a quality user experience and content,” said Michael Schneider, CEO of Mobile Roadie. He stressed that his company was not a maker of “cookie-cutter” apps because its templates were highly customizable.

“I’m not going to comment on specific competitors, but I believe as a result of the recent changes at Apple many of them will be out of business,” Schneider later wrote in a blog post. “The ones that are left are going to have to step it up, which is a good thing for the App Store, for our business, and for consumers.”

Since the App Store’s early days, Apple has boasted about the number of apps served through the store and highlighted its rapid growth. The App Store launched with 800 third-party apps in July 2008, and by November 2009 it surpassed 100,000 apps. As of February, Apple’s App Store had accumulated about 150,000 apps.

That number has translated into a huge competitive advantage. In terms of quantity, the App Store has a commanding lead in the mobile space. Android is in a distant second with 19,300 apps. Windows Mobile’s store has 690 apps, Palm has 1,450, Nokia carries 6,120 and BlackBerry serves 4,760. Sure, you may not want to use the majority of the Apple store’s 150,000 apps, but the fact that customers have nearly eight times more selection than they do with Android phones and nearly 200 times more than with the Windows Marketplace is a convincing sales advantage for many.

In recent months, Apple has expedited its App Store approval policy to be much faster than it used to be. Several iPhone developers told Wired.com that the App Store has recently been approving their apps in as little as two days. Last year, an app approval could take between two weeks and two months.

Apple did not respond to Wired.com’s request for comment regarding major changes in the App Store. But Scott Schwarzhoff, vice president of marketing at Appcelerator, an app-building service, said it was likely that a larger staff as well as new automated tools are helping to speed up Apple’s approval process. As a result, that frees up bandwidth for Apple to institute bigger-picture changes to improve the quality of the App Store, he said.

“Now it’s a quality versus quantity issue,” Schwarzhoff said. “When they first started they wanted tons of apps, but now with 150,000 apps out there, there’s no need for Apple to have bigger numbers on its side as compared to quality applications.”

Without a doubt, those put out of business are chagrined by Apple’s capriciously changing App Store policy. For example, Fred Clarke, co-president of a small software company called On the Go Girls was making thousands of dollars each month earlier. Now, with 50 of his company’s sexy apps banned from the store, his salad days are over.

“It’s very hard to go from making a good living to zero,” he said in an interview with The New York Times. “This goes farther than sexy content. For developers, how do you know you aren’t going to invest thousands into a business only to find out one day you’ve been cut off?”

However, all of the developers contacted by Wired.com said they were happy with the change. They said that thanks to Apple’s new (albeit unclear) quality standard, the App Store will be less cluttered with trashy apps, which benefits both developers and consumers.

Eric Kerr, co-founder of AppLoop, shut down his company 10 months ago because of financial and personal reasons. AppLoop’s service, called App Generator, turned any online publication with an RSS feed into an app — something that might have fallen under Apple’s new ban of cookie-cutter apps. But Kerr sided with Apple on its decision to prohibit apps with extremely limited utility made with app generators.

“Apple doing this is really only accelerating the inevitable,” Kerr told Wired.com. “You have all these applications that don’t provide any additional value to users, and in the long run the market will determine they’re useless and people will not download them. Because of the application discovery problem, that might take a while for that to actually happen, and during that time period you have a bunch of low-quality apps clogging the system.”

Obscure Rules

Still, Apple has come under fire because of the lack of clarity regarding policy changes in the App Store. During Apple’s removal of apps containing overtly sexual content, many criticized the company for allowing sex-tinged apps from big companies such as Playboy and Sports Illustrated to remain in the store.

Apple’s vice president of marketing Phil Schiller said Apple had removed the sex-tinged iPhone apps in response to complaints from parents and women. However, he said the apps from Playboy and Sports Illustrated would remain because they came from reputable companies.

“The difference is this is a well-known company with previously published material available broadly in a well-accepted format,” Schiller told NY Times.

But as Apple continues to push its new quality regime, a question arises: Where do you draw the line between raising quality standards and censorship? That’s already stirring some debate. Apple crossed the line with German tabloid Bild, whose iPhone app was pulled because of a feature containing sexual content, an act that the publication has called “a curtailing of press freedoms.”

“Today it is naked breasts, tomorrow it could be editorial content,” said Donata Hopfen, head of Bild’s digital media department, in an interview with German magazine Der Spiegel. She said Bild was urging the Federation of German Newspaper Publishers to take action “in the interest of freedom of the press.”

That battle, however, will be a tough one for Bild. Apple is not a government, and thus it is not governed by the First Amendment, said Peter Scheer, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition.

In other words, the company’s rules may be arbitrary and unfair, but Apple has the right to make decisions about what it carries in its App Store.

The fact that it lacks significant competition may be making Apple act more high-handed than it would otherwise, Scheer noted.

“They’re trying to create this aura of respectability and selectivity,” Scheer said. “Apple’s trying to create this censored environment. It’s a little like China. What China does to the whole internet with pornographic content is what Steve Jobs is trying to do in his neighborhood for the iPhone.”

With a big lead in the numbers game Apple’s move toward emphasizing quality might just help it retain its dominance in the mobile market. However, Scheer said if Apple’s moves continue to be construed as acts of censorship, it could drive customers to more open alternatives such as Google’s Android platform.

“Eventually you embitter a lot of people who don’t understand why they’re being denied access to something they’d like to have on a device they have and they own,” he said.

See Also:

• Apple Removes Porn Apps From App Store
• Apple Explains Semi-Ban of Sex Apps
• IPad Apps Could Put Apple in Charge of the News
• Rumor: Some iPhone Apps Scrapped From iPad by Steve Jobs
• For the iPhone’s App Store, Quantity Really Does Matter

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

James Sikes, the San Diego runaway Toyota Prius driver, filed for bankruptcy in 2008 and now has over $700,000 in debt. According to one anonymous tipster, we're also told he hasn't been making payments on his Prius. UPDATE! More »

Micro-blogging service Twitter's user growth has almost levelled off since September 2009, according to a study

Twitter's growth seems to have lost its momentum, according to a new study.

Growth in the micro-blogging service's number of users peaked at nearly 20% last April, but had dropped down to 0.15% in December 2009, says a study by Barracuda Networks.

Recent web analytics had already suggested that Twitter had reached its peak, as Twitter.com recorded a traffic high in July 2009 and has never reached that level since. According to Compete, Twitter reached 23.5 million users in August 2009 and stayed put. However, as Twitter client applications have grown and have become a bigger percentage of Twitter's user base, the numbers didn't necessarily reflect the actual situation of the micro-blogging service. By using the growth in Twitter users, instead of the site's traffic, the Barracuda study now puts things into perspective.

Strong growth in user numbers of 21.17% in April dropped to 10.95% in July and to 0.82% in September, and has ever been under 1% since – 0.58% in October, 0.34 in November and finally 0.15 in December. The accounts deleted by month also was growing, from 3.36% in April to 12.03% in October from which they peaked off to 8.48% and 8.14% percent in November and December.

To get these figures, Barracuda analysed more than 19 million Twitter accounts for frequency and content of tweets, user-to-user interactions, and each account's overall activity level. "We have been monitoring Twitter for more than one and a half years and keep track of the public timeline, and any new account of the public timeline," says lead researcher Nidhi Shah.

Barracuda's chief research officer, Paul Judge, explains the stagnation of Twitter with the end of "The Red Carpet Era". Twitter shows "a very concentrated growth spurt during the early part of 2009 – a period that we define as the 'Twitter Red Carpet Era'. Twitter users came online to follow their favorite celebrities. The most famous people have already joined Twitter, so I don't think they'll see another growth spurt like that," says Judge. From November 2008 to April 2009, several big celebrities, including Ashton Kutcher, Oprah Winfrey and John Mayer, joined Twitter.

In comparison, the number of Facebook users has been rising continously. According to Facebook, today 50% of the 400 million active users log on to Facebook in any given day, with more than 35 million users updating their status and more than 60 million status updates posted each day.

Another Twitter study published by US web analytics company RJMetrics last month seems to confirm Barracuda's report. It says that Twitter has 75 million users, with a large percentage of accounts being inactive.

According to RJMetrics' data, about 80% of all Twitter users have tweeted fewer than 10 times, about 40% of accounts have never sent a single tweet, and 25% of accounts have no followers.

Barracuda concludes that "the past six months have shown steady decline in the number of new account registrations", but the number of new users a month is currently at about 6.2 million. Their report doesn't say anything on the number of deleted accounts.

Twitter, which has not yet commented on the reports, recently announced that it had hit 50 million tweets a day. According to Barracuda's report, users are becoming more active on Twitter, with the most active users being those with about 1,000 followers.

According to internal documents leaked to TechCrunch, the company's forecast that it would go "from 25 million users at the end of 2009 to 1 billion in 2013".

Until now, Twitter itself has not released precise figures on its growth. Recently, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone posted an email newsletter saying that it had recorded 1,500% growth in the number of registered users but did not specify the timespan.

The reports certainly will prompt several questions. Has Twitter reached its peak? Is Twitter a micro-blogging service where only marketing people tweet to each other? Was it overhyped? How relevant is it anyway?

One thing is certain, the days of micro-blogging might not look as rosy as they did last spring, but they are far from over.

Google is giving tweets a visibility they never had before. After the launch of Google's real-time search in December, Twitter's traffic rose 9% from December 2009 to January 2010, according to ComScore.

Twitter's number of users may not have grown, but with the Google deal it became more important than ever.

Source of Daily Mail story refuses to divulge 'well-known social network' where he posed as girl of 14 and received sexual approaches from men

Facebook has called on the ex-detective who posed as a 14-year-old girl online on a "well-known social network" and said he was approached by men making sexual suggestions within minutes to name the site he used.

But Mark Williams-Thomas, whose experiences were described by the Daily Mail in a contentious story this week, declined to name the site today. He suggested that it would not be helpful to the site's users – and that it might damage its reputation or attract paedophiles to use it more extensively.

A spokesperson for Facebook said that it was important to identify the site so that young users could be protected. "If you really want to protect people online, then you should name sites which allow this. It's up to the Daily Mail and Mark Williams-Thomas. If they really want to protect their readers, they should give the name."

However, Williams-Thomas said that although the operators of the site would be able to identify it from his description in the story written in the Daily Mail earlier this week, identification would not be beneficial because it might attract unwelcome users. "The site would implode," he told the Guardian.

Facebook is threatening to sue the Daily Mail over a story which appeared in Wednesday's paper under Williams-Thomas's byline which was headlined "I posed as girl of 14 on Facebook. What followed will sicken you". The piece described how Williams-Thomas had created a profile on a social networking service of a 14-year-old girl and within minutes of the profile going live had been contacted by men aged between 20 and 40 seeking sexual gratification.

The Mail has accepted that it wrongly suggested that the social network was Facebook, issuing an apology and blaming the error on "miscommunication". However, Facebook is still considering whether to sue for damage to its reputation.

Facebook has come under fire this week after the conviction of Peter Chapman, who used Facebook and other social networking systems to pose as an 18-year-old boy and lure 17-year-old Ashleigh Hall to a meeting, upon which he raped and killed her. Some police organisations have criticised Facebook for not installing a "panic button" system that would let young users alert them over their concerns – although there is no evidence that Hall had any worries about who she thought Chapman was.

Williams-Thomas, who was a detective with Surrey police until 2002, previously made an ITV documentary about the hunt for paedophiles in which he shadowed a team from the Metropolitan Police's Paedophile Unit.

He added that the piece which appeared in the Daily Mail was part of an ongoing study being carried out into safety of social networks, which will be published later this year in a peer-reviewed journal.

• To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000.

• If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication".

Foursquare means business. The 1-year-old startup now has a huge brand — Starbucks — using its platform to test out an experimental customer rewards program.

Starting today, frequent Starbucks visitors who check in at retail locations using Foursquare will earn customer rewards. Although there’s no financial incentive or free coffee to begin with, customers can unlock the “Barista badge” after five checkins.

Of course that’s just the beginning; the coffee behemoth plans to use Foursquare as a testing ground for alternative reward strategies and to unlock “the pulse of the experience” for each store.

If you think this is a straight-up play to offer location-based mobile coupons, think again. The New York Times Bits Blog writes that the company is “hoping to use Foursquare to provide even more meaningful prizes, like invitations to special events, photo-sharing or online reputation scores.”

As Starbucks figures out how best to leverage the checkin, we have to step back and appreciate the magnitude of this decision. With Starbucks on board, there’s no question that Foursquare has all the tools necessary to appeal to — and reach — a mainstream audience. Plus, now that a second company (the first was Tasti D-Lite) is tapping into Foursquare as a loyalty program platform, the additional proof of concept will pave the way for other businesses to follow suit.

[img credit: Bits blog]

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Reviews: Foursquare

Tags: foursquare, MARKETING, starbucks